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Tuesday, 19 June 2012

ブラック★ロックシューター / Black★Rock Shooter

Studio
Ordet are likely here to stay, for while the full series of Black★Rock Shooter was a little disappointing, it was also
extremely memorable, visually striking and really came into its own in its
final two episodes. If this is what happens when KyoAni bow to pressure and
fire one of their directors (Ordet being founded as a direct result of the
backlash against Lucky★Starleading
to director Yamamoto Yutaka being sacked), maybe they should do it more often.

Until
near the end, I was finding Black★Rock
Shooter something of a disappointment, which is why I fell out of the habit
of watching each episode as it came out – the series ended back in March. It
was, I felt, little more than the OVA stretched out a little and very slightly
altered. After all, this series only got 8 episodes of prestigious noitaminA
airtime, while the OVA was 50 minutes long – about 2 ½ episodes. And I wasn’t
impressed by what was added.

One
of the things I liked about the OVA was one of the things that I saw criticised
most widely – the contrast between the exaggerated and fantastical world of
Black★Rock Shooter and the rather mundane
world of two girls, and how the small, rather silly problems of who is best
friends with whom seem like the world-shattering battles that the alternate
world makes literal. The very first episode of Black★Rock Shooter did all it could to destroy that nice
subtle, observation by making the things that lead to the internal battles of
the girls’ other selves generally screwed up: new character Kagari is a screwy
wheelchair-bound Munchausen’s sufferer and masochist who is openly hostile when
she meets young Kuroi Mato, making jibes involving macaroons and having loud
screaming fits. This all gets translated to macaroon cannons and a creepy voice
repeating ‘Kaere’ in Black★Rock
Shooter’s world – it’s all just a bit too exaggerated to work and would have
been much better if Kagari were subtly cruel and manipulative.

After
the situation with Kagari gets resolved, the plot settles into a slight
variation on the OVA’s – there, Mato and Yomi make friends, but Mato also
making friends with Yuu causes a lot of tension. Here, Yuu and Mato have been
friends a long time, and everyone’s relationships are manipulated by a creepy
student counsellor at school – which is the stage at which I became a bit
bored. I was also slightly saddened by the treatment of the sporty Kohata,
whose story arc was pat and whose counterpart(s) in the other world didn’t
impress at all.

However,
it was all rather redeemed in the last two episodes where many things were
revealed: the manipulative counsellor was hiding a connection with Yuu and had
a very interesting relationship with her, told in a rather adorable flashback;
Yuu herself was rather unlike what everyone had assumed; Dead Master was
unexpectedly not going to have the role expected of her and there was actually
going to be more of an explanation of who the characters in the other world
were and why they looked like the main girls. While the OVA heavily hinted they
existed independently of the girls and could simply enter their hearts – which
made the physical resemblances as random as some of those in Kingdom Hearts
– here, they were ‘other selves’ who take on the burden of physical pain for
the girls, and when they are defeated, all the stored up pain disappears,
though seems to take memories with it. This made for some interesting moral
questions as to whether or not it was acceptable for the girls to offload their
suffering, though some of the passive-suffering-while-another-fights when Mato
became aware of the world was as creepy a glorification of suffering as
anything in Loveless. Indeed, the series probably could have done
without taking every opportunity to get its schoolgirl characters naked. It
could be handwaved as showing their vulnerability, that they had been
internalised by their counterparts, that they existed outside of any normal
plane as something of an essence – but ultimately when it happens that much
it just looks like fanservice.

That
aside, the story ended up being quite an interesting and thought-provoking one
and certainly better than I had expected at the beginning. The characters were
likeable and the otherworldly designs were awesome – I had a particular
fondness for the giant arms of Strength’s body (no matter who inhabited it).
The CG work here was superb, cel shading good enough that most of the time it
just looked like extremely dynamic hand-drawn animation, but allowed for great
sweeping camera shots and those staples of girls-with-guns fans’ favourites:
huge weapons and a rain of glowing bullets.

Perhaps
it could have been more, and it got off to a bad start in my view, but its
aesthetic was extremely memorable, its story turned out to be surprisingly
strong for the limited number of episodes, and it eventually hit the right
emotional notes. A near thing, but ultimately a success story.

2 comments:

I thought Black Rock Shooter was okay. Like you, I enjoyed its later episodes more. I did think it got a bit too angsty at times and the brutal violence in the alternate world was over the top. It had its good points, but it could have been better in my opinion.

I didn't mind the angst, though the angst of the first episodes seemed very forced. The violence never troubled me - it was too over-the-top without being gory, so it seemed like a video game really. But yeah, definitely had the potential to be more. I was just relieved it was as good as it was!

Welcome to Adziu's small corner

Welcome to my little blog, here in this small corner.
Over the years I have seen a few hundred animated series and movies, and the purpose of this blog is to house my impressions. This is not intended to be a daily blog with impressions of each episode: I write my thoughts only after viewing something complete. Several have been imported from previous blogs dating back to 2005 - as well as drawing from journals from as early as 1999!
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